News

Canadian woman has miscarriage after 3 hour wait in ER

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From the Prince Edward Island Guardian. (H/T The Way The Ball Bounces)

Excerpt:

Losing her first baby was devastating enough but having to do it in a crowded waiting room is what angered Christine Handrahan the most.

The 29-year-old Peakes woman was nine weeks pregnant when on July 12 she started bleeding.

Fearing the worst, Handrahan and her husband, Michael, headed to the Queen Elizabeth Hospital’s new emergency room.

There she waited more than three hours, blood seeping out of her jeans, tears rolling down her face as she feared she was losing her baby — or that she might be bleeding to death.

Still, she waited and waited.

More than three hours passed before Michael had enough.

Only one patient had gone through the big glass doors to see a doctor so he knew the wait was going to be extensive.

Michael helped his wife out of a wheelchair into his truck and they made the 45-minute drive to Prince County Hospital in Summerside. There she was immediately rushed into the hospital’s emergency room where the mother-to-be was told that she had a miscarriage.

[…]Handrahan says nobody at the hospital showed her any compassion.

“They could have given me a room to go in. Not necessarily a room with a bed. Even if it had been their TV room, or their lunchroom, or their closet. That waiting room was jam packed full of people.

“Somebody should have cared enough to say ‘Oh my goodness, you’re going through a miscarriage, do you need some quiet time?’ I was fighting my tears. I wanted a place to go cry.”

[…]Health Minister Carolyn Bertram maintains safety is not being compromised at the Charlottetown hospital.

Click through all 3 pages, until you have supped full with horrors, as the Thane of Glamis would say. And don’t worry, the socialist executive director apologized – although she would not say that the miscarriage was inappropriate. So we’re all good, right? Well, the bureaucrat is good – because she already got paid through your taxes. And no, you can’t have your money back. And good luck suing the government, too. They’ll use more of your tax money to overpay their defense lawyers.

But if you need an abortion or a sex change? No problem – then it’s free courtesy of Canadian taxpayers.

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Commentary

Why does God create people who he knows will choose Hell?

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It’s Bill Craig’s question of the week, and I think this is a legitimate question.

Here’s the question:

In your debate with Victor Stenger, he advanced the argument that God could not logically be a perfect being and creator of the universe. In response you stated that God does not create because of anything lacking in Himself, but because the creation of the universe benefits man, because he can come to know God and have a loving relationship with Him. I was just wondering, how does this square with the Christian doctrine of Hell? If Christ is the only way to God, and unbelief is punished by eternity in Hell, it seems likely that the vast majority of people, or at least a good number, will end up in Hell. In what way could we say that creation benefited these people? The doctrine of Hell has always been one of my major problems with Christianity, and it was my main reason for becoming an atheist.

And you can click here for Bill’s answer.

And you can find the Craig vs. Stenger debate right here for free. I keep the DVD in my office, because it’s a good debate.

UPDATE:

Here is Matt Flannagan’s answer:

The question why does God create people who he knows will go to hell seems to me to make some mistakes.

It assumes that it’s wrong to do something which one foresees will result in ruin for another. But one does not have to think far to see this is a mistake. Suppose a person told me that if I did not have an affair with her she would kill herself. i refuse and she kills herself. Am I guilty of murder? It seems to me not for two reasons, first although I foresaw the result I did not cause it she caused it by her actions hence I did not kill her. Second, the alternative in this instance did involve me causing something evil, it involved me causing an act of adultery and disloyalty.

Take this to the hell case, God foresees that others will freely do something which results in their damnation that does not mean he causes this action and so is not culpable. Second, the alternative to this would be to not create this person or this world and the question is whether this would be a better state of affairs, its not obvious it would be.

Moreover I am inclined to think this argument proves too much. As a parent I know that my child will at some point lie, sin and do bad things, does it follow that parents should be held accountable for their children’s actions and can’t justly punish them? After all they could have refrained from having Kids.

He’s a prominent Christian debater from New Zealand who debates the same sort of people as William Lane Craig does.

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News

US Air Force decides not to close F-22 Raptor production plant

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Great news from Politico. (H/T ECM)

Excerpt:

The Air Force will hang on to its F-22 tooling at Lockheed Martin’s Marietta, Ga., production plant even after it stops making the fifth generation fighter jet in 2012, according to Flight International’s Stephen Trimble. Though the Air Force has said in the past the goal would be to provide a long-time service plan for the jets, “the decision also implicitly preserves the option to restart production if future administrations decide that the USAF needs more than 186 F-22s,” Trimble writes.

The Weekly Standard explains:

The Air Force originally planned for 750 Raptors — at the time called the Advanced Tactical Fighter — as a replacement for the venerable F-15 Eagle. Strategic shifts, like the collapse of the Soviet Union and the rise of the infantry-heavy war on terrorism, steadily decreased the fleet’s planned end-strength until Congress settled on 187 airframes in 2006.

As Russia and China continue their steady defense buildups and America’s aging fighter fleet continues to decay, the need for the “finest fighter jet ever built” only grows. Keeping that Lockheed assembly line open may seem like mundane news today. But it could end up saving the military big bucks down the line, as the peer threat looms larger.

Now that the JSF is facing substantial delays and rising costs, we need to have the option of restarting production on the F-22 when Obama loses in 2012. This is really important. We need to keep our edge in the sky. There are bad people in the world who threaten peace, prosperity and liberty. We need to make them believe that any aggression they consider will be costly. We need to deter aggression.